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25 May, 2012
Sourced from goffgough
Originally from goffgough
Reblogged from kdyldy
Tagged as politics politicians corruption
Notes (477) -
Although a majority of the Senate voted to repeal tax breaks for the big five oil companies, the 51-47 vote fell short of the 60 needed.
Hahaha. I love how achieving Cloture (3/5th of the full Senate) is now functionally equivalent with a majority. GO DEMOCRACY.
30 March, 2012
Sourced from thinkprogress.org
Originally from think-progress
Reblogged from occupyallstreets
Tagged as Democracy legislation government corruption
Notes (74) -
Whistleblower says BofA defrauded HAMP
While working at Urban Lending, Mackler said he saw BofA and its loan servicing subsidiary, BAC Homes Loans Servicing LP, implement “business practices designed to intentionally prevent scores of eligible homeowners from becoming eligible or staying eligible for permanent HAMP modification.”
The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged.
BoA let through just enough HAMP modifications to avert suspicion and allay congressional critics, while not enough to incur any substantial losses to its own bottom line, according to the complaint.
“In other words, BoA has had it both ways. BoA has continued to maximize the value of its mortgage portfolio with anti-HAMP modification practices and managed to make money by committing fraud on homeowner,” the lawsuit said.
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NYPD Officer Sent To Psych Ward By Superiors After Reporting Corruption
Graham Rayman at the Village Voice brings us more on officer Adrian Schoolcraft, the modern day Serpico who was sent to a psych ward for reporting on corruption in the NYPD. While working out of the 81st precinct in Brooklyn, Schoolcraft became aware of a pattern of crime victims getting caught up in bureaucratic hurdles that seemed to have purposely been set up to make it hard to report serious crimes. Schoolcraft reported a number of these incidents to investigators. That’s where things take a turn for the insane:
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting-which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft’s superiors-his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
Officer Schoolcraft is the same man that released two years of recorded roll calls at NYPD precincts, leading to the award winning series by Rayman that has revealed incompetence and corruption in the NYPD. The story of Officer Schoolcraft’s forcible psych detainment was recently released in a 95 page report that vindicated Officer Schoolcraft, who has been suspended without pay for more than two years. He has since filed a lawsuit. The report was actually completed two years ago, and the NYPD has tried to keep it under wraps.
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reagan-was-a-horrible-president:
Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons
As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.
Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.
The move reflects a significant shift in strategy for the private prison industry, which until now has expanded by building prisons of its own or managing state-controlled prisons. It also represents an unprecedented bid for more control of state prison systems.
Corrections Corporation has been a swiftly growing business, with revenues expanding more than fivefold since the mid-1990s. The company capitalized on the expansion of state prison systems in the ’80s and ’90s at the height of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ contracting with state governments to build or manage new prisons to house an influx of drug offenders. During the past 10 years, it has found new opportunity in the business of locking up undocumented immigrants, as the federal government has contracted with private companies in an aggressive immigrant-detention campaign.
Did y’all catch that?
“plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full”
14 February, 2012
Sourced from The Huffington Post
Originally from socialuprooting
Reblogged from reagan-was-a-horrible-president
Tagged as prison industry violence crime politics corruption corporatism
Notes (192) -
Congresswoman Overheard Peddling Influence in Exchange for Appointment Favors
[ This is an old story from 2009 but, frankly, too irresistible to pass up in light of further advances of the American Security State in last year three years. ]
In 2005 the NSA recorded (via wiretap) Congresswoman Harmen trading a sentence reduction for espionage charges against members of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for lobbying favors to become chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
The Congresswoman, Democrat Jane Harman, is outraged at the “abuse of power” in her conversations being intercepted though the action was court approved. Ironically Rep. Harman was a staunch advocate of the USA PATRIOT ACT, the very legislation which permitted such wiretapping, but seems to find its protention application to herself unsavory. The FBI pursued a further corruption charge against the Congresswoman but Attourney General Alberto Gonzales “pulled the plug” because he needed the Congresswoman’s public support for such wiretapping programs.
The lolz are thick and juicy here. Some choice quotes from the Congresswoman:
“I never had any idea that my government was wiretapping me at all!”
“I think this is an abuse of power Wolf!”
“I want to make sure members of Congress are not routinely wiretapped without their knowledge.”
29 January, 2012
Tagged as Congress House of Representation video Corruption Israel libery Security State
Notes (4) -
14 December, 2011
Sourced from anarchyagogo
Originally from anarchyagogo
Reblogged from fuckyeahmarxismleninism
Tagged as corporate interest corporatism corruption government democracy
Notes (101) -
The Daily Show on the Federal Reserve’s secret class warfare against the United States taxpayer
The U.S. government loaned banks $7.7 trillion in secret bailout funds at no interest and then borrowed the money back at interest.
2 December, 2011
Tagged as daily show economics corruption financial crisis video banking federal reserve
Notes (5) -
Hank Paulson’s inside jobs
What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.
The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.
Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.
The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…
Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out…
The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.
When we found out about the Moscow meeting, I asked how on earth Paulson thought such behavior was OK. But now I think he was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.
Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that “Government Sachs” conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.
Paulson, says Teitelbaum, “is now a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago, where he’s starting the Paulson Institute, a think tank focused on U.S.-Chinese relations”. I’d take issue with the “distinguished” bit. Unless it means “distinguished by an astonishing black hole where his ethics ought to be”.
29 November, 2011
Tagged as corruption economics banking Hank Paulson Treasury goldman sachs
Notes (28)
